Natasha Romanoff Drabbles
by Mitodoteira
Summary: This is a collection of drabbles about Natasha Romanoff and what goes on inside her brain. Alludes to her past. No AU in the actual story, but the setting could be considered slightly so. Not a crossover, but I think Natalia Romanova and River Tam are similar characters and I am using River as something of a model for Nat's mind. Post-movie. Rated T for safety; dark themes.
1. Hiding Down the Rabbit Hole,

Natasha Romanoff Drabbles

Disclaimer: The Avengers movie, Tasha/the Black Widow, and any other recognizable characters that appear in this "story" (loosest definition of the word) do not belong to me.

Notes for clarity: 'She' is the Black Widow, 'they' is everyone else, and this is set post-avengers. In my theorized world, after the events of The Avengers, the avengers scattered, Tony going back to his house in Malibu, Bruce to a remote village to practice medicine, Steve to see the world and its changes over the last seventy years, Thor back to Asgard, and Clint and Tasha back to doing missions for SHEILD, all of them just trying to pretend it all never happened. However, there was a new threat that saw the avengers, reunited, and after the threats started becoming more frequent, they all moved into Stark Tower for convenience's sake. Slightly AU, but mostly just making up what happened after the story.

Prompt: Fragile.

They think she is strong and really, she can't blame them. She was trained to pretend, after all, it would really be a personal failing if they could see through it all, but still, when she tells Clint 'I'm fine' when she's _not_ and he believes her it still stings. They're wrong, they're all wrong, right from the start when she killed her first person and didn't cry and they called her perfect thought they finally found someone strong enough, they were wrong. She's fragile on the inside and all the Red Room did was cover that fragility in package wrapping, trying to seal it off from the rest of her, the rest of her that was just a perfect machine, and teach her to put herself back together again when she breaks fast enough that it seems she was just thinking for a moment, to hide it all under layers of painted widows and frosted glass. The little porcelain doll hidden deep in all the punches and seduction and missions has be broken so many times that it is now more glue than porcelain, its once-pristine features now a mess of white and grey and dirt and fingerprints, and yet there is always some new way to break it.

Prompt: Mask.

In the beginning, they know she's wearing masks because they read her file, of course she's mistrustful, who wouldn't be. Honestly they all are. Clint hides behind walls, doesn't even pretend not to be, Steve behind soldierly obedience, Bruce behind his calm that they _know_ now is fake, Tony behind unpleasantness and sarcasm and laughter and robots. She doesn't know about Thor — it's odd, she thinks, that the most jolly, open, lighthearted, and ignorant one of them is the greatest enigma, but then, he is thousands of years old and from another planet, so that's really not so unexpected. Then the masks start coming off as the relax, start to trust each other, and she stops faking the wrong reactions and becomes as stony-faced as Clint, like a potato sack pulled over her head — they know she's hiding something, but they don't know what it is. Eventually she starts showing the all the same face, her "true" face, the one she shows Clint, but she, and only she, knows that that's a mask too. She doesn't remember what her true personality once was anymore, too many layers of masks and walls.

Prompt: Silent.

They think the air ducts are "Barton's domain," but it's not true. Clint is claustrophobic — not much, not enough to not use then if he has to, but he doesn't like it. They're _hers_. She crawls through them silently, no-one noticing. Half the pranks they blame on each other are really her doing, not that they'll ever find that out. She can move much more quietly than they know, is smarter than they know, physically stronger than they know, but she hides it, keeps it to herself, because she can never trust the enough to let her guard down all the way, never be sure that they won't betray her in the end like everyone else she'd let herself trust.

Prompt: Insane.

To someone who just read her file, it would not be a surprise to find that she was crazy, diagnosed with schizophrenia, paranoia, every physiological disorder known to mankind, but someone who knew her would have been shocked. Despite her past, despite everything, she always kept everything neat, organized, _sane_. If you met her randomly you never would have guessed at how completely insane she was. They probably could have guessed from her reaction to watching River in _Serenity_, it would have been immediately obvious if they'd known her history but not _her_. Maybe they should have known when she'd been talking to Loki, out maneuvering a box full of cats, or when she'd so dispassionately shoot the guards whenever it was necessary and say, smiling as if something was funny, "pretty red dot" referring to the holes in their skulls. But they didn't. She hid it too well, let herself get lost in the red, red, blood-red world of her nightmares during training, which would go on for hours on end, pretending the punching bags were her old trainers and the Red Room. All in all, when she finally visibly fell down the rabbit hole, it may have been predictable, but it was still unexpected. She never admitted it of course, and they still let her fight because she could still fight, she just did not know who or what she was fighting anymore.

A/N: This is the first chapter. It is rather dark. I plan to write another one in which she gets less crazy, mistrustful, etc., but I can not promise that I will.

A/N2: I would very much appreciate reviews, even if they're only a few words. I would be grateful for constructive criticism, but this is my first story, so please don't be too mean about it (emphasis on constructive).


	2. Counting Pretty Red Dots

This is chapter two of Natasha R. drabbles.

Thank you allweloved ( u/4373572/) for favorite-ing my story. :)

... So much for getting less dark, but oh well. I'll go where the writing takes me.

Disclaimer: Not mine. Obviously. Couldn't there just be a general disclaimer on the whole site? *Annoyed ranting.*

Prompt: Kill

That was all she knew; kill or be killed — not by the same person she was supposes to kill, mind you, but by her trainers for weakness. «Нам не нужны малинкий девотчки. Нам нужны салдаты. Убийцы.» — _ "We don't need little girls. We need soldiers. Assassins."_ — they would say if she or her co-trainees did something wrong. Her first kill was at eight. They had brought in a group of men, bruised, scratched, and tied by painful-looking ropes and put them in a line. They lectured the girls about strength and weakness, and made them line up. One by one, they were ordered to kill on of the men. The ones that wouldn't do it were killed on the spot; the others cried. When it was her turn, she didn't let herself cry, and they promoted her to the next training level, increased surveillance, and put her in the Black Widow program. She had had nightmares abou that day for weeks. She had literally grown up in a world of killing and death, had watched her parents die before her eyes at _five_, and so she had, for a while become rather apathetic towards it: If she didn't care, it couldn't hurt her, she thought. She wished she had never had to find out just how wrong she was.

Prompt: Ledger

That day when she was eight would later be counted as the first red mark on her ledger. There would be many more to come, and that one was far smaller than most. She didn't really have a choice, and he probably would have been killed by someone else, if not her. The others though... First her missions, starting at sixteen: Seduce, get the information, kill. Even then, she would have been killed herself had she failed to complete an objective, so Natasha tries not to count those years. Later though, after she ran away and became a bounty hunter, there was nothing stopping her from doing something else, and yet she continued killing. Loki was wrong, she thinks bitterly. "Gushing" is so random, so immeasurable, but she remembers the face of everyone she ever killed, neatly catalogued in red paint on black paper in her mind. Even though she tries not to count those early years, they still eat at her conscience. She knows how many she killed, how, what they'd done... And every person she saves from certain death counterbalances one red mark. It was why she agreed to join the avengers. She doesn't think she'll finish, though. Destruction comes so much easier to her than heroism. She doesn't think she'll live long enough to beat the horrors — to really be a hero.

AN: Okay, I'm done for now so I can post today. If anyone want to suggest a prompt, I'd be happy to write on it. Thank you to anyone who bothered to click on this.


	3. Maybe There's a Paradise for Me as well

This is chapter three of Natasha R. drabbles.

Sorry for the delay, real life interfered. Don't you just *love* deadlines?

Thank you BethN ( u/4269661/BethN) for reviewing, you should try reading her stories.

Prompt: Torture.

Torture was not unknown to her, but she was not overly familiar with being on the receiving end of it. Capture, yes, torture, not so much. She would turn interrogations around, seduce or fight her way out of manacles, and she was good enough that it was rare that she actually had to endure torture. She had getting information out of people down to an art, which included torture if needed, but most of the torture she had actually _endured _was interrogation training. Once, she had been captured; nothing she knew worked until there was actually a rescue operation to get her out. After that week she couldn't sleep at all for days until she started taking sleeping pills, which all the Black Widows had access to — a slip-up cost a lot more than a sleeping pill.

Prompt: Dance.

She had wanted to be a ballerina. Dancing had always come naturally to her, and after seeing a ballet once, her mind was made up. She wanted to dance like that. When the Red Room took her, she was forbidden to dance, and yet, in the short time after the initial fear had worn off but before she saw the horrible truth, how terrified she ought to be, she was often caught pirouetting through the halls, leaping and twirling when she thought no-one could see. When they made her learn to fight she told herself that it was just a different dance they were teaching her. It was what she calmed herself with, what she told herself at night when she couldn't sleep — you're just learning a different kind of dancing. It still showed in her style, in the way she moved, and it still helped her drive away the horrors that always accompanied her, wherever she went.

Prompt: Safe.

She hadn't felt safe since... Well, she had probably felt safe before she was at the Red Room, but she didn't actually remember the feeling of safety, being able to just let her guard down. Even when she was with Clint, she was still very alert at some level, constantly scanning for any sign that she should run, fight, whatever was applicable. It was not until the Avengers' fourth mission as a team did she start to trust any of the others to watch her back. It is not until much later, when she's cornered and there's a DoomBot zooming towards her, her death reflected in its mechanical eyes, and then, out of nowhere, a shield, an arrow, two different beams of energy and an enormous green fist collide with it, blasting it to pieces, that she realizes that she can actually trust these people, and for the first time in at least seventy five years, she feels safe.

A/N. So, there, I even made it have a happy ending. Round of applause? No? Anyway, I'll try to write the next chapter within the next few days, but as usual, no promises.


	4. Innocence and Blood-Splattered Knives

This is chapter four of Natasha R. drabbles. Sorry for the delay and short chapter, but life is interfering, finals week is coming up, essay submission dates approach... I promise I can write more after 12/21/12.

Thank you Faustian5 ( u/2440621/faustian5) for favoriting and Rachy20089 ( u/3033542/) for following, it makes me very happy.

Prompt: Innocent.

Innocence was not a virtue in the Red Room, and thing that were not virtues were purged. Beauty, strength, obedience... Twisted to fit their needs... By the time she was 14 she laughed at innocence, thinking it was a fake construct invented by the powerful to control the young; it was what she'd been told. Later, after a few years at SHIELD, she had wished for innocence, wished she could be like the new recruits brought in from the air-force, clean and innocent, not needing to worry about making up for the red on their near-spotless ledgers, wished she could worry about the moral implications of stealing a few dollars' worth of mechanical pencils rather than weigh the chance of discovery against the usefulness. When she met Steve Rogers, she had wished that she, too, had always stood for morals so that now that she confined herself to them she didn't have to be guilty about her past. When Tony and Pepper's daughter is born with curly red hair, she sees a chance to see what happened if her innocence — her naïvety, even — had not been stolen from her — _blood splattered her hands, the knife sinking deep into the man's throat, and she smiles triumphantly when the trainers compliment her strength, trying desperately not to think about what she'd just done_ — so early, and she puts everything she can into protecting the precious innocence that Ashley represents, trying to give her self-declared _therapōn_* the life she wished she could have had.

* Therapōn is Ancient Greek (when Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Plato, Socrates, Sophecles, Sappho, and others lived) for alter ego (as in another person who represents you, not as in another personality of your own) and ritual substitute. In epos (basically Iliad and Odyssey) can also mean the apprentice of a hero, like Patroklos in Achilles's therapōn. Sorry, just had to use it. It fits, anyway.

By the way, I was planning to write a 'what if' story for all the Avengers. The ones I've got so far are:

What if the Red Room never found Natasha in that orphanage?

What if Clint had killed Natasha when SHEILD told him to?

What if Clint had killed Natasha when Loki told him to?

What if Howard and Maria Stark didn't die in a car accident when Tony was 18?

What if Howard Stark had been a better father?

What if Loki hadn't brought the frost giants to Asgard on Thor's coronation and had taken finding out about his adoption better (he found out before he was powerful enough to do much damage and could be forced to listen or Odin didn't fall into Odinsleep at most inopportune moment possible, etc)?

What if Bruce managed to get full control of the other guy (basically Bruce's brain in Hulk's body) almost right away?

What if they had lost the final battle?

What if Tony and Bruce had known each other since childhood (went to MIT together or met when looking for other geniuses when they were younger, etc)?

What if Loki had been chosen king of Asgard even though he was a frost giant?

What is Natasha had killed Clint during their first meeting?

What if Clint couldn't be un-brainwashed and Natasha (or Phil or Nick or Maria) had to kill him?

What if Howard Stark had found Steve in the ice a few weeks after the crash-landing?

What if Steve died when he was in the ice?

What if (this is assuming Natasha was born in 1928) Natasha and Steve met and she turned to the 'good guys' side seventy years earlier?

What if Natasha killed Steve when she was about sixteen?

What if Bucky hadn't fallen off of that train?

What if Tony knew about SHEILD and figured out who Natasha was within days?

So, any suggestions? I can't promise I'll actually write all of these, but if you tell me which ones seem most interesting to you, I'll try to write those.

As always, if you have any prompt suggestions, I'd love to write on them.


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